The next step is testing the FlightAware 1090 antenna in the same spot when it arrives.

The antenna arrived some time ago, but not the pigtail so haven't been able to test it. Getting tired of waiting I ordered the FlightAware Pro Stick USB dongle + filter and a 50 cm N to SMA pigtail (RG316) which should arrive on Monday. I live in a "quiet" area so might try the new stick without the filter for a couple of days to see if adding it makes things better or worse. So far the Pi has been running perfectly on WiFi despite relatively weak signal.

Have you bought some spare microSD cards? I recently bought some Samsung 16GB EVO class 10 cards from eBay for £5 each. I have been using Samsung 16Gb class 10 cards about a year and find them very reliable.

I haven't, no. I was hoping to find some laying about from other things but I may just purchase a couple.

I'm assuming the mSD cards are essentially the booting OS? So they can be swapped in and out as necessary?

The Pi kit arrived today, and I'm desperate to have a little play about with it to get to grips with the OS etc. I may install the OS and update it. Not much point in downloading FR at this time as the rest of the hardware won't be here until Tuesday.

Originally Posted by Tmax

So far the Pi has been running perfectly on WiFi despite relatively weak signal.

This is good to know, as my Pi will be at the other side of the house from the Wi-Fi. However the coverage is excellent in general with this router.

Everything is stored on the Card so once you get FR24 working you can switch off and remove the card, and put the original back to practice your RPI command line skills, then switch back to FR24. So you can make a copy of a working system on your PC before you experiment a bit more and perhaps mess it all up. Suggest you back up your current card before you make to many changes that you did not really mean to...

Suggest you install putty on your PC and play with SSH into the RPi. I only attach screen and keyboard in extreme emergencies ;-)

So I decided un-box and set up the Pi. Very easy! (I think, I hope?) and it was literally just plug and play. Nice simple GUI to work through. Having used Debian some time ago, this was a familiar environment.

I set it up originally via a full wired setup. (HDMI, keyboard, mouse, LAN etc) and ran sudo apt-get update etc to ensure it was fully up to date.

Had to make a few changes in the Pi settings to run Wi-Fi, but very simple.

Then installed PuTTY (Thanks boab and the PI is now running stand alone with just the power adapter connected.

Lastly installed ConnectBot for Android so I can also use an old Android device to access the Pi remotely via my mobile (which is connected to the same Wi-Fi network at the moment). I suspect there will be further complications/programming required if I wanted to use my existing mobile to connect when it is running on the cellular network. To check in on the Pi whilst I am out and about or to even use the whole setup whilst i am out and about - Fully mobile.

So all of the hardware has now arrived and been installed. Quite simple. The antenna has been temporally hung near an upstairs window until i decide where to put it and once all the tweaking and configuring has been completed. I think I've now successfully ran the receiver from my laptop using PlanePlotter (Dump1090 and RTL 1090) and I've also (I think) managed to configure and upload data to FR24 via the Pi. I have a few queries about that, however those are for the data feeding thread.